Songs I love

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As a guitarist and a songwriter I’ve been been influenced by many different styles of traditional folk music from around the world. Two of the main schools of influence through which I eventually found my own way of writing were the folk music traditions of England, Scotland and Ireland and those of West Africa, more specifically Mali. In the early nineties, I came across the music of Martin Carthy and Davey Graham at around the same time that I discovered the Malian greats, Boubacar Traore and Ali Farka Toure. As incongruous as it might be to compare the musical equivalent of a frosty winter morning on an English moor with that of sweltering afternoon on the Niger Delta, I’ve always felt there were endless points of comparison between the two worlds. I began my side project The River, with the Malian master N’goni player, Badje Tounkara and French guitarist Seb Martel in order to deepen this profoundly complementary dialogue.

Being the descendant of Italian, Irish, Ashkenazi and Gypsy immigrants, I don’t have a big claim to represent British or Irish Folk traditions any more than I do those of West Africa but what I do feel I can stake a claim to is the right to blend styles just as my blood has been blended with the trace of so many different languages. I’ve written several songs both for my own albums and for The River that explore the dialogue between northern European Folk and West African traditions but I wanted for the ongoing Vol II of Songs I love to find a cover that I could play with in the same way. Much has been made of the links between Mississippi blues and Mali but I find the ties between certain aspects of British and Irish and Malian folk to be just as strong. Martin Carthy is one of my all time favorite guitar players, I played Badje Tounkara his version of Cold haily, windy night and Badje said.”On dirait la musique de chez nous” “It sounds like music from my country”

With Kitty I’ll go is a wonderful song that I first heard sung by the extraordinary Norma Waterson. I fell in love with it when I discovered Waterson Carthy’s first album. Reading Martin Carthy’s original liner notes, I found out that it was an Irish song and that there is also a version in Gaelic. I live in the hills of the Cevennes, in a land that I left London for in order to ‘ramble over the mountains wild.’ so singing these wonderful words feels like a perfect match!

Order collector book/cd ‘Songs I Love’ here : http://shop.beatingdrumrecords.com/
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This summer, Sylvie Lewis and Dawn Landes came to visit me at my home; Sylvie had written to me a few weeks earlier to say that she and Dawn were passing through en route to Spain and would love to meet up and hang out for a day. At that time, I was in the middle of proof reading the last version of the Songs I Love book before sending it off to the printers but it felt like as good a time as any to start on the next installment of the series.
Dawn and Sylvie had been singing ‘Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key’ by Woody Guthrie during their summer tour and although we initially thought about doing that one, it inspired me to get out some old Lead Belly vinyls. Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly who played and recorded together were undoubtedly among the greatest and most prolific American songwriters of all time and both of these unique writers documented their age in the most profound way, carrying the torch for the disenfranchised and the poor.
Their songs, like the great American literature of the time such as Steinbeck’s ‘The grapes of wrath,’ stand as pillars of 20th century American culture; almost everything I hear today pales in significance compared with the power of these two songwriting giants.

In the end I suggested to Dawn and Sylvie we record a song Lead Belly used to sing, ‘There’s a man going round taking names’. I’ve always loved this song although I’ve never quite grasped the meaning of the lyrics. There’s such a power to the words ‘there’s a man going round taking names’ – both profound and slightly sinister, my sense is that it refers to being marked out for hell or heaven according to our actions. (If anyone knows the significance and meaning of this song, please let me know!)
It was a joy to sing it with Dawn and Sylvie in one take, sitting around one microphone, the window open and the birds joining in outside.
Vol 2 of Songs I Love is underway!

Buy collector book/cd ‘Songs I Love’ here : Beating Drum shop

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Many of you are aware of this project already as you’ve been faithfully downloading the covers that I’ve recorded and posted over the last three years. The idea behind ‘Songs I Love’ began as a way to interact with the people that follow my music on a level that wasn’t purely reliant on an album release, I began giving away a cover every two months or so back in 2010 and with it I would post the story behind my choice of song.

Back in the days when I was signed and before I started my own label Beating Drum, I found it frustrating that the only object I could propose was an album of around twelve songs every two or three years. Being free now to make the creative decisions around what kind of object to make, I wanted to propose something a little different using the seventeen songs that I’ve recorded so far for this cover series.

I’m convinced that music lovers around the world are hungry for new and exciting ways to present music. With downloading and streaming and fewer people buying songs in any kind of physical form, I wanted to push the boat out with my label Beating Drum and present music in an original and beautiful package that brings music, Art and writing together in one object. Using cut-up paper, I painstakingly made portraits of all the songwriters that I’ve covered in the series and for the book I edited the original text that I’d presented with each download from my website, making the text worthy of the kind of beautiful object that we wanted to present. Because many of you already have the covers as mp3 downloads, I wanted to make sure for those of you that buy the book, that the music would be treated with the same level of care and love as the book and images. I worked back into the original mixes to improve them and the songs were then mastered by Francois Fanelli.

The book was designed by Olivier Carrie aka Uncle O who I’ve been working with since the album Two Grains of Sand, I provided the artwork and images and he came up with the design concept and typeface with which to put it all together. Because words are not enough to describe all things visual, I asked my friend Mr Cup to take some photos of the book/cd so that you can see for yourselves what kind of love and attention to detail that we’ve given our little red book!

On my shop, you will find that we’ve presented the book either on its own or in a package with the new album ‘Between Dogs & Wolves’. The book can be bought with the cd version of the album or with our beautiful gatefold vinyl version of the album which also contains a cd inside. I really hope you will love this book/cd as much as we loved making it, your feedback on this will also help me determine for the future, what kind of other exciting objects we can invent the next time we bring music to you!